THE DESIGN LIFE

Unconscious competence in design

Have your skills become second nature? You‘ve arrived.

A number of years ago, I attended a talk by Petrula Vrontikis* where she described the four stages of competence: first is the period when you are unconsciously incompetent (you don’t know what you don’t know). Then comes a phase when you are consciously incompetent — which should spark you to hone your craft and aim for conscious competence! Finally, after struggle and learning from mistakes, you should arrive at unconscious competence, at least in some areas of your field, where the practice of your skills becomes second nature. This past year, I think I’ve arrived. Here’s how I know.

*The concept of four stages of competence goes back to Martin Broadwell’s “the four levels of teaching.”

When I started my first position as an official UX designer, I was the mythical unicorn design department of one, learning UX design on the job in a race to launch Speak Agent, an academic vocabulary learning platform for K–12 teachers and their English-learning students. It’s coming up on almost a year in my second job as a UX designer, this time in a much larger organization (PBS), with teams with multiple sets of internal and external stakeholders. As I have scripted usability tests, worked with product…